Busting the Deinstitutionalization Myth: We Actually Have More Beds Than Ever Before
New data upends common beliefs about asylum closures, deinstitutionalization, and rates of psychiatric coercion.
Prof Michael Collyer
and I have an article in Social Sciences
'Offshoring Refugees: Colonial Echoes of the #UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership' https://mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/8/451
part of the special issue The #Colonial Legacies in #Asylum and Welfare in Europe.
The UK-Rwanda proposals differ from official practices of #deportation as they have developed in liberal democracies since the 1970s.
I think that #asylum needs to be thought of as something #sacred. I haven't quite worked this out yet.
There is the basic necessity of a system of asylum. To believe in asylum is to believe in freedom. It is to accept that an individual who does not fit into the community of her nativity can flee. It is to believe that we cannot be forced to conform by tyrannical masters or norms, that the individual can escape authority.
That is not yet sacrosanct. There are two more aspects. The first is a sort of Fregean context principle but applied to people and communities. Never ask after the meaning of an individual in isolation from the community. Just as the significance of a word is its contribution to the significance of sentences in which it can occur, a person is fundamentally part of community. But see above, there are only sentences because there are words and there are only communities because there are individuals. It is the individuals who count.
The second is that a person outside of a legal system is without standing, without protection and, because of the context principle, has lost her personhood. On a very practical level, the asylum seeker is outside the protection of the law but subject to its force. Border spaces are so violent not because people on the move are criminalised, the criminal can expect due process, but because they are outlawed. You can do anything to a non-person. (All classic #Arendt.)
So we need a process of asylum to bring people in, to end exile, which must then be a sort of rebirth, a new beginning, a rupture. It must be inviolable and unconditional, or perhaps only conditioned on need. We cannot regulate people's mobility, accepting claims only from those who apply through the appropriate channels or travel on '#SafeRoutes' as the #UK establishment wish. Instead we must respond to the unconditional need of the person who has no legal standing and bring her in so that she can be remade. That is something sacred
"NPR spent several days speaking to asylum seekers who say conditions in the building are dire. Many described zones of 80 to 90 people sharing two bathrooms. A 26-year-old man named Deivy says he's fleeing armed conflict in Colombia and that he's been living in the shelter for over a week.
He asked that his last name be withheld for fear of retaliation. Deivy says fighting over use of the bathroom facilities is common and showering is an odyssey. Parked outside, two trailers with showers serve the entire building.
"It's bad in there," says one Mauritanian man named Neimar, who also asked that his last name be withheld for fear he'd be in trouble with shelter authorities. Sitting listlessly on a nearby park bench, Neimar describes the experience as a sort of limbo. "We had no life where we came from, but here we have no luck here. No clothing. No food. Nothing."